♦ Monday ♦
Heathrow yet again. My second home. At least I was able to practise before ordering my Uber, because once I arrive in Copenhagen I won’t see a piano until just before tomorrow’s recital. Every time I leave home, I tidy up my flat, cook and freeze leftovers, vacuum, close up the Fazioli: I’m my own cleaning lady. I’m constantly packing, too. Yesterday I spent hours going through my evening gowns, trying on the new, revisiting the old, wondering which would be suitable for the upcoming halls and programmes. I googled “red evening gown” as a kind of joke, searching for a new dress for Milan’s Teatro alla Scala in May, and up came a gorgeous one. It is now at the designer’s studio being hemmed. That was a stroke of luck.
The amount of repertoire I play each year is frightening. Every other problem pales in comparison to having my notes learned and memorised in time. In February I played five Bach concertos and a Ravel concerto, while working hours every day on Brahms’ No 1, a monster I hadn’t played in years. The day after that concert I was back at work, brushing up the difficult solo programme for tomorrow. Then after Copenhagen it’s on to Tallinn, where I begin my Mozart odyssey, performing the complete Mozart piano concertos over the next two years. My biggest worry is trying to get Bach’s Partita No 6 back into my 65-year-old memory. That will take hours of work, at the piano and while travelling. Many pass the time scrolling through Instagram; I look at a page of music and hear it in my mind.
♦ Thursday ♦
Audience members often ask me what I think about when I’m playing. To quote the great Wanda Landowska, “The notes, dear, the notes!” If only it were that simple. The concentration is exhausting and yet the performance must look easy. You’re engaged in incredible mind games (people rave about a pianist’s fingers, though the real marvel is the brain), but for a pianist’s message to have meaning it must have emotion behind every note, it must tell stories, it must transmit a work of transcendent beauty. Every fibre of your being, from head to toe, participates in a good performance.
Copenhagen went well. I gave my all, saw some friends and felt a wreck the next morning, but packed up and got myself to the airport. The first thing that I did on arriving in Estonia was to find a late-night supermarket. Touring is mostly wondering where your next meal is going to come from.
The Estonians have always seemed to me to have music in their souls; they need it now more than ever
Artists are now endlessly asked to do silly videos for social media saying, “Hi, I’m Angela Hewitt and I’m happy to be playing in such and such a place.” It’s getting tiresome, but I was happy to come across one by this morning’s conductor, Pierre Bleuse, who was new to me. He seemed jovial and characterful in the video, as indeed he was when we met in my dressing room. That’s the drill: you go through a concerto for the conductor in 20 minutes, discussing tempos and dynamics. Then bang, you’re on stage, usually in front of a piano you’ve never played and a group of musicians you’ve never seen. Today we had only an hour to rehearse a 30-minute piece. It had a good feel and we left in smiles. The horn player wanted a photo because his mother played him all my CDs when he was a child. That made me feel ancient.
♦ Sunday ♦
I’m on the ferry from Tallinn to Helsinki, crossing the Gulf of Finland to catch my next flight. To an Estonian or Finn this is probably quite ordinary, but to me it feels like an adventure on a snowy March morning. By the end of today I should be in my house on Lake Trasimeno, Umbria. I would never have guessed I’d see so much of the world when I was playing the piano as a child.
The concert in Tallinn began with the Ukrainian national anthem—it is done at every concert—and many of the orchestra members were wearing blue and yellow ribbons. I would have gladly put one on my gown, but there wasn’t time to find one. There were American soldiers in camouflage in my hotel, too. The Estonians have always seemed to me to have music in their souls; they need it now more than ever. We gave a moving concert, then yesterday I did a three-hour masterclass, advising four young pianists in front of an audience of piano teachers and students. If I can inspire these young musicians to go further with their expression, to improve their quality of sound at the piano, to play Bach differently from Chopin, then I’m happy.
Now I have over two weeks in Italy with only one performance near Florence and a concert for some school children. But I will be practising six to seven hours every day. To be able to play at any hour without worrying about neighbours is total happiness—though I know that, when those weeks are over, I’ll be itching to be on the road again, doing what I’ve done already for almost half a century, loving it more than ever.
Correction: the original text of this article referred to Angela rehearsing Brahms’ No 1 Symphony. The addition of the word “symphony” was incorrect, and has been removed.
